Read The Orion Protocol Online
Authors: Gary Tigerman
The Orion Protocol
THE ORION PROTOCOL
GARY TIGERMAN
CONTENTS
E-Book Extra:
The Truth is in Here: An Interview with Gary Tigerman
Prologue:
The huge, thwopping Navy helicopter set down like a prehistoric bird
1.
“Two months ago, if anybody had said we were gonna catch this in the. . . .”
2.
“Now I’m gonna need a few volunteers.”
3.
Once through the Oval Office door and the President’s busy anteroom,
4.
Ensconced in a video editing suite at the Public Broadcasting building...
5.
On the LC-130 Hercules from San Pedro, California
6.
Entering Goddard Space Flight’s waxy fluorescent-lit corridors required ...
7.
The lights were still burning in the East Wing of the White House,
8.
Fiddling with the Goddard security guest pass clipped onto her jacket...
9.
Across from Augie Blake, inside the cavernous fuselage of the LC-130 Hercules,
10.
Behind the locked door of the Goddard workstation,
11.
“Tricks of Light and Shadow. That’s cute.”
12.
The fact was, thousands of years of accumulated ice at both poles had...
13.
Sandy Sokoff had had discreet meetings with military and intelligence...
14.
The next day, at a dead-end lot in one of Atlanta’s sprawling suburbs,
15.
Dr. Sergei Sergeivich Berenkov, senior scientist, kept a closer eye than...
16.
“We are alive in a new Golden Age of Astronomy.”
17.
This guy Eklund is out of his mind
, Winston thought.
18.
With her Beanie Bullwinkle presiding, Angela sat next to Miriam and...
19.
Setting up the last of the seismic sensors, they were unprepared for that...
20.
Thinking.
21.
Parked outside the Dharmadhatu in downtown Boulder,
22.
Escorted into the Sandia Labs by a delegation of scientists,
23.
As the President’s counsel took his one-man-show farther up the road,
24.
Emerging from the Antarctic ice, it was erect on all fours,
25.
“Richard? Close the door, would you?”
26.
In the twelfth-floor wood-paneled office at the Corporation for Public...
27.
Miriam and Angela took their lunch on the run as they hurried back to...
28.
Blair House, the historic vice-presidential residence, was still impressive...
29.
The Arlington Club golf course was not normally open in February,
30.
“Father, I understand you’ve been called upon from time to time to use...
31.
At the cortex of the National Security Agency headquarters...
32.
As she entered the UC-Boulder parking lot nearest to Jake’s lecture hall,
33.
“I think I see something.”
34.
“So, tell me,” Angela said, cradling a second glass of Pinot Grigio...
35.
“Can you hear me now? Colonel Blake?”
36.
Using the dual-processor Mac in his office,
37.
“Oh, no . . .”
38.
“And good luck, Mr. Grotsky, wherever you are.”
39.
Commander Jake Deaver and Colonel Augie Blake had gone to the...
40.
“My God, Jake.”
41.
The squat, gray Australian relay station had the spilled beer and moldy ...
42.
Leaning against the doorjamb in Angela’s office and watching...
43.
They waited in the anteroom to Chairman Lowe’s office,
44.
Across town, Sandy Sokoff was thinking about his impending meeting...
45.
With the word that a Naval Intelligence team was being dispatched onto...
46.
Jonathan Quatraine was starting to feel quite at home in the...
47.
The course at Arlington was a vast swath of wet and soggy turf from the...
48.
Soaked to the skin, Pierce found Congressman Phillip Lowe waiting in...
49.
Emerging alone from the vaults of the National Archives,
50.
“Congressman Lowe, on line one.”
51.
From the more public foyer that communicated to the West Wing,
52.
Jake mumbled to himself, unbuckling the business-class seat belt...
53.
Sandy Sokoff set his empty glass down on the mantel in the residential...
54.
Former Commander Jake Deaver had left Boulder and flown to Egypt...
55.
Dr. Paula Winnick’s prewar town house in a posh section...
56.
Outside and across the street, the surveillance baton had been passed...
57.
Urine and bat guano
. Deaver imagined the laugh he’d get telling...
58.
The morning drive-time traffic crossing and recrossing the Potomac...
59.
Shit.
60.
It was not as if Deaver hadn’t been thinking about it.
61.
Dicks in dick suits
, Angela thought.
62.
Lightning was crackling, sending bright white fiberoptic roots to ...
63.
The Secret Service were obliged to wait outside the Map...
64.
Everything outside Jake’s windshield kept disappearing in the lashing ...
65.
As the two men strode back through the West Wing corridor,
66.
After prying cold, clenched fingers off the steering wheel,
67.
Augie took them up over the aspens, banking radically and pushing the...
68.
“So, we went back,” Jake said, a shot of
cuervo anjo
beginning to warm...
69.
Angela was feeling both scared for Jake and personally responsible for...
70.
Returning from Denver on Air Force transport, Colonel Augie Blake...
71.
“I talked to Deaver. After you folks’s little fiasco.”
72.
A phone bank was set up at the PBS station and staffed,
73.
In his office at NASA, Augie Blake stood stiffly in a beribboned Marine...
74.
From three TVs in the Oval Office at the White House,
75.
At the downlink station, the Aussie grad student was tuned to CNN...
76.
“Security! Colonel Blake! Open up! Colonel Blake!”
77.
The shooting pains down Augie’s arms and up the side of his neck were...
78.
On the west side of the Washington Mall, Jake had stopped trying to...
79.
By the time they arrived at the White House with a black helicopter...
80.
The conference room down the hall from the Oval Office was crowded...
81.
Discussion dissipated and people turned away from the TV news crawl...
82.
In the ICU at Bethesda, Augie was still benefiting from the anesthetic...
83.
It was nicer going in the front door at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,
84.
Miriam Kresky, wearing nothing but a man’s white dress shirt...
85.
The normally sticklike rosebushes had been tricked into leafing out by...
86.
In high Earth orbit, the Orion array of mirror satellites had been...
87.
It wasn’t bitter cold, but the temperature was low enough that they...
1973/Lunar Receiving Lab/Houston
The huge, thwopping Navy helicopter set down like a prehistoric bird and disgorged the astronauts onto the pad at the Lunar Receiving Lab in Houston, Texas. Shuffling toward the NASA research hospital in their bulky BIGs (Biological Isolation Garments), the returning Young Gods of Space passed network cameras and a roped-off press pool that applauded them every step of the way.
“Welcome back, gentlemen! Congratulations!”
“Commander Deaver! What was it like on the Moon?”
Hustled inside by escorting Marine guards and Navy nurses, they could only give a big thumbs-up and grinned telegenically before disappearing from media view.
Once inside the lab and proceeding through the hyperclean corridors, Commander Jake Deaver and Colonel Augie Blake joked with the personnel bunched up in doorways and affected game swaggers, unconsciously competing in the effort to disguise any signs of strain from their 600,000-mile round-trip to the Moon.
“Colonel Blake! Whoo-ya! Some landing up there!”
“Piece o’ cake.”
“Can o’ corn.”
Sleepless for much of the ten-day voyage, the two-man crew of
Apollo 18
had splashed down in the Caribbean only hours before under marginal conditions requiring a retrieval/rescue in twelve-foot seas. Millions had watched the event
live,
holding their collective breaths as
the helo from the USS
Hornet
labored to extract them from their bobbing and rolling spacecraft and then set them down safely on the carrier deck. But the odyssey wasn’t over yet.
“Colonel Blake! You guys get wet out there or what!?”
“Hell, we’re all ninety-eight percent water. At least the Commander is.”
“Hoo-ya!”
Raucous cheers combined with sheer exhaustion-adrenaline buoyed them now as Jake Deaver and Augustus “Augie” Blake were led directly toward the quarantine unit.
“Augie-Doggie! You gonna let a Texas girl buy you a drink?”
“Later, darlin’. Gotta go kill us some cooties.”
They banged through rubber-sealed double doors marked
QUARANTINE
and then stopped, standing patiently still as the antiviral team descended on them, ending their all-too-brief victory lap.
Protected by otherworldly clean-suits, the NASA doctors unceremoniously stripped off the bio-iso garments that had been delivered to Jake and Augie by rescue swimmers, and prepared the two men for decontamination. While everything from boots to underwear was being shucked, bagged, tagged, sealed up, and taken away to be analyzed and ultimately burned, Augie offered a deadpan running commentary.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to apologize in advance for how plain ungodly awful the Commander here smells right now.”
Deaver acknowledged the team’s laughter without looking at his pilot.
“In my own defense, I can only say that any urine-sample
je ne sais quoi
is probably left over from the Colonel’s dead-stick landing and the rest is just honest American sweat.”
Tested, poked, punctured, and prodded, none of it fazed them. They’d long since become inured to standing nude in a roomful of scientists of every gender.
But the next part was no joke. Sequestration in the “delousing” chamber, an ordeal involving radiation baths and noxious chemical scrubs, amounted to mankind’s last line of defense against any friendly lunar microbes that might have hitchhiked their way back to Earth with the
Apollo 18
crew. Not a subject discussed much by NASA, any extraterrestrial
virus had the potential to run through the human population like a massive biological terrorist attack. By comparison, the nineteenth-century ethnic cleansing atrocity that wiped out the Cherokee in Oklahoma (courtesy of smallpox-contaminated Army blankets) would rank as a bad flu season on the scale of human suffering. Classified worst-case scenarios involving alien pathogens projected millions to tens of millions dead or dying before medical science would have time to develop an effective response.
However, at the height of the Cold War and the Space Race, potentially catastrophic biohazards had been weighed against the unthinkable prospect of getting beaten to the Moon by the Soviets and judged an acceptable risk. Still, precautions had to be taken.
So, Jake and Augie’s lean fit bodies were aggressively irradiated, purged, and punished to a degree commensurate with terminal cancer treatment until cautiously declared bug-free.
The buck-naked Buck Rogers were then zipped into sterilized jumpsuits fashioned like feetie pajamas and taken by another Marine escort to an unmarked white door with a stainless steel handle and a lock on the outside.
Taking up sentry positions, the surgically masked Marine corporals delivered crisp salutes and stood at ease, their hands sweating inside sterile latex gloves. Deaver and Blake looked at each other, returned the salutes and stepped inside the room.
What was said behind those closed doors at the Lunar Receiving Lab in Houston in 1973 would not be divulged in NASA-sanctioned media interviews or mentioned in any astronaut biographies, authorized or otherwise. The classified, psych-med debriefing notes of the Navy psychiatrist in attendance would remain an Official State Secret well into the twenty-first century.
Within days of
Apollo 18
’s return, NASA and the U.S. government would cancel the remaining missions of the Apollo program, citing budget concerns and lack of public interest. In addition, it was announced that ambitious plans for sending American astronauts to Mars by 1984 would also be scrapped.
Thus the wonder and triumph of mankind’s boots-on-the-ground exploration of the solar system began and ended with the Apollo program.
And no human being has ventured more than a few hundred miles from home ever since.